The Grownups

The sober-minded manner in which the captive British sailors matter was handled had given me some hope that the country wasn't being run by crazy people. Not so fast, reports the Guardian, whose after-action report on the crisis states that "Pentagon officials asked their British counterparts: what do you want us to do," and "offered a series of military options" including "for US combat aircraft to mount aggressive patrols over Iranian Revolutionary Guard bases in Iran." The British government, however, wasn't looking to be used as a pretext for war, but actually wanted to handle the issue at hand. "The British declined the offer and said the US could calm the situation by staying out of it. London also asked the US to tone down military exercises that were already under way in the Gulf." Meanwhile, "The British government also asked the US administration from Mr Bush down to be cautious in its use of rhetoric, which was relatively restrained throughout."

And, well, good for Britain.

To me, the view that this affair was some kind of humiliation for the West or a PR coup for Iran is nutty and says more about the bloody-minded instincts of Americas hawks than it does about events in the world. The important issue in US-Iranian relations remains the Iranian nuclear program. One key variable here remains the attitudes of a wide swathe of countries who don't necessarily put a tremendous priority on this issue. What went down over the hostages is exactly the sort of thing likely to make policymakers in, say, Argentina or Belgium or South Korea inclined to see the Iranian regime as dangerously unpredictable and prone to envelope-pushing and the anti-Iranian coalition as being led by responsible people. Now, of course, it turns out that the anti-Iranian coalition wasn't quite as responsible as it seemed.

Comments

Why does it matter what Argentina thinks about this? Let's not drift from an understanding of a need for a different approach to US foreign policy in the Middle East to some sort of how-will-this-play-in-Buenos-Aires pandering and immobilism.

Posted by otto | April 8, 2007 10:12 AM

As this was probably done to facilitate a prisoner swap, I doubt it's going to be seen as the sort of reckless behavior that will damage Iran. Really, Americans kidnapped and probably tortured members of the Iranian government. So Iran did the same thing to an ally of the US. If Iran had tortured them or abused them, it would be a different story. But absent that, nobody is likely to care outside of Britain or the Us.

that's not to say it's a PR coup for them or anything, but it's probably not anything other than a wash. Most countries will be uneasy with Iran raising tensions, but they will sympathize after our own governments illegal actions earlier this year. Matt never seems to grasp that we don't get the benefit of the doubt anymore in foreign capitals. If their prisoners come home alleging torture after the British soldiers came home after fairly decent treatment then it's going to go very badly for the US.

Posted by soullite | April 8, 2007 10:15 AM

how-will-this-play-in-Buenos-Aires pandering and immobilism.

The subject at hand is the allegation that the Iranian prisoner release represented a "PR coup for Iran". The counterallegation is that, no, it represents a moderate PR victory for the UK and US. If you want to discuss subjects other than how this event played around the world, go to another thread.

Posted by mattsteinglass | April 8, 2007 10:22 AM

the view that this affair was some kind of humiliation for the West or a PR coup for Iran is nutty

What's nutty is belief that "humiliation" has any place in describing a struggle with a country which is much, much weaker militarily than we are. The joy of being the biggest guy in the room is not having to worry about petty "humiliations."

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | April 8, 2007 10:48 AM

SomeCallMeTim hits on something that always strikes me as odd. The incredible insecurity of the "USA, USA, we're number one, the greatest bestest country ever, Wolverines!!!!" set. The need for constant reaffirmation of American "greatness," the desire to take some small country and throw it against the wall periodically, the sheer love of violence as an end in itself (as long as they're not getting their hands dirty). These are not qualities typically consonant with the proverbial biggest guy in the room. Most such exemplars in real life tend to be placid and self-contained in my experience.

However, my guess is that when you have a bunch of cheeto stained doughboys calling the shots, this is the kind of policy inclinations you are going to have.

Posted by Klein's tiny left nut | April 8, 2007 11:09 AM

The subject at hand is the allegation that the Iranian prisoner release represented a "PR coup for Iran".

Right. PR isn't everything in the US-Iran dynamic. But insofar as we're talking about PR, we're presumably talking about how this plays in foreign capitals. I think in Buenos Aires or Riyadh or Beijing or wherever it makes Iran look bad -- like a country not in control of its security forces prone to rash, risky action. Britain looks like a country capable of soberly accomplishing goals at little cost to itsef.

Posted by Matthew Yglesias | April 8, 2007 11:14 AM

I think that MY's post conflates two distinct issues. I agree that the view that this was a "humiliation" for the West is nutty, basically for the reasons that MY gives.

But whether this was a PR coup for Iran is a different question. My sense is that it was -- though not because it was a "humiliation" for the West. How did this play well for Iran? Well, for starters, a main discussion point in the foreign press was the contrast between the treatment of the British sailors by the Iranians (videos, interrogations and all) and the treatment of Guantanamo detainees by the US.

Overall, the emerging picture is that this crisis was not planned at the highest levels in Iran -- rather, it seems to have been initiated by local Iranian military officials (I'm getting this from reports in The Guardian and the BBC). Once the crisis was underway, it looks like senior Iranian and British officials got on the same page very quickly, and found a way to let everyone climb down and get the sailors home before the Americans managed to escalate the situation beyond the point of no return.

From a PR point of view (to audiences outside of the US), I think it reflected reasonably well on Iran that its competing factions were able to get the sailors back to the UK safe and sound within two weeks.

A final point: I disagree with MY's statement that the central issue in US-Iranian relations is Iran's nuclear program. It would be accurate to say that Iran's nuclear program is at the core of US demands in respect of Iran, but that's something else entirely.

The central issue in US-Iranian relations is whether the US will take military action against Iran, on some pretext or other. That's the main issue. The rest of the world (including the UK) largely viewed the sailors-crisis through the prism of that question.

Posted by Eric | April 8, 2007 11:20 AM

Britain looks like a country capable of soberly accomplishing goals at little cost to itsef.

Yeah. But I wouldn't be as quick as you to exclude the US from that assessment, based merely on a report that the US had asked the UK whether they would like us to use a menu of shows of force to serve their negotiating aims. In other areas of the world, notably East Asia, the US has shown it knows how to restrain and downplay the aggressiveness of its military presence, in the service of diplomatic aims. The professionals who run the US armed forces largely understand the need to do this, and the fact that we offered to take a more aggressive posture if the British so desired could simply be seen as making an offer to back up an ally's chosen negotiating strategy.

Posted by mattsteinglass | April 8, 2007 11:26 AM

"Yeah. But I wouldn't be as quick as you to exclude the US from that assessment, based merely on a report that the US had asked the UK whether they would like us to use a menu of shows of force to serve their negotiating aims. In other areas of the world, notably East Asia, the US has shown it knows how to restrain and downplay the aggressiveness of its military presence, in the service of diplomatic aims. The professionals who run the US armed forces largely understand the need to do this, and the fact that we offered to take a more aggressive posture if the British so desired could simply be seen as making an offer to back up an ally's chosen negotiating strategy.
Posted by: mattsteinglass on April 8, 2007 11:26 AM"

For this to really work though, wouldn't Iran need to know about the threat of force? Did they even know about this? Otherwise we would be using a British-Iranian issue as a pretext for war, thus using the Brits as a tool for our own means. The Brits are smart enough to know that from this crowd, saying they'll back you up militarily really means "let us take advantage of you and do what we say."

Posted by Reality Man | April 8, 2007 11:44 AM

Munich was handled in just this kind of "sober" fashion as well, Matt - and for exactly the same reasons - at the time, neither France nor Britain wanted a war. Ponder that though: a war in 1938 would have been far, far less expensive than the one that was actually fought.

Now back to the present - the "sober" handling of this situation taught Iran what, exactly? That there are few (if any) consequences to:

-- illegally seizing soldiers in waters outside Iran
-- violating the Geneva convention while holding them

Which will likely lead the Mullahs to believe that they can push harder next time, as this step cost them nothing. When that next step does come, I predict that the Left in general, and Matt in particular, will not connect it to this event - because doing so would require a full world-view reexamination. And that would be way, way to painful.

Posted by James Robertson | April 8, 2007 11:49 AM

Ponder that though: a war in 1938 would have been far, far less expensive than the one that was actually fought.

Aside from everything else, ponder whether there's any possibility that Iran can, in six years, upgrade its military sufficiently to defeat even today's France.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | April 8, 2007 12:01 PM

You're right James. Germany would have had a much easier time of it if they went and attacked the West first while Britain was still mobilizing and no fear of a secondary eastern front. It would have been great for Germany. Without having to worry about Russia, London would have fallen by 1940.

Posted by Rob | April 8, 2007 12:14 PM

Wow!! A Munich comment. Haven't seen one of those in a long time. Some people are stuck, I guess. With relation to the PR angle, my take is that Eric takes it right (and I live close to Buenos Aires). The way it ended put the Iranians in a relatively good light; the prisoners were treated with reasonable restraint under the circumstances, even though cool heads prevailed they didn't appeared to be intimidated, etc. Not a PR coup, maybe, but not bad.

Posted by Carlos | April 8, 2007 12:19 PM

Re Rob

"You're right James. Germany would have had a much easier time of it if they went and attacked the West first while Britain was still mobilizing and no fear of a secondary eastern front. It would have been great for Germany. Without having to worry about Russia, London would have fallen by 1940."

I would suggest that Mr. Rob avail himself of the book by Walter Goerlitz, "The German General Staff," before writing such rubbish. The fact of the matter is that the German armed forces were in no condition to fight a war in early 1938, and had they started such a war against Britain, France, and Czechoslovakia (the latter of which had a strong army which was equipped with more modern equipment then was the German army), they would have been defeated. As a matter of fact, according to Prof. Goerlitz, there was a strong possibility that, in the event of Chamberlain calling Hitler bluff, the German General Staff was planning a coup to oust Hitler from power.

Posted by SLC | April 8, 2007 12:38 PM

Aaw, yes, Munich comments. Nobody gives a fuck. The history of the world does not revolve around one event in 1938. It is but a single data point, but in American political discourse it is the only data point because so many Americans know so little about non-European nations, like, say, Iran. The knee-jerk spouting of "1938! Munich! Appeasement!" just shows the speaker has nothing relevant to say. It is much harder to understand Iranian internal political dynamics and factional politics than to yell for the hundredth time, "this is all 1938 again!" It is funny how Hitler keeps on popping up again under every rock whenever there is a problem.

Posted by Reality Man | April 8, 2007 12:44 PM

Taken from a recent Fareed Zakaria column:

"Vali Nasr, an analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations, argues that "in the past, when the regime has been ready to negotiate with the world, conservative elements within have often created facts on the ground that raise tensions and make such negotiations difficult. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his allies are trying to defeat the moderates. This current crisis reinforces their position that the West is irredeemably hostile to Iran.""

This is rather obvious. The more warmongers try to convince us that Iran today = Germany in the 1930's, the stronger the Iranian hardliners' argument becomes. The best thing to ever happen to Iranian hardliners are the stupid, infantile arguments made by the American right trying to drag us into war with troops we don't have.

Posted by Reality Man | April 8, 2007 12:50 PM

Mattsteinglass: Peace, brother. Even within the narrow scope of whether it's a PR coup or not, I don't see why we shd care what public or policy-maker opinion in Buenos Aires thinks, because there is no conceivable situation where that might matter. Public or policy-maker opinion in Morocco or Saudi Arabia or Lebanon might perhaps be relevant.

And even there, perhaps a little evidence of whether elites in these countries think is has been a humiliation or not would be better than this postulated claim that the incident has encouraged them to think that Iran is dangerously unpredictable.

For the record, I dont in any sense see this as a 'humiliation' in objective terms, and think UK did a reasonable job in getting their servicemembers out. But I don't think that widespread attitudes in Latin America to this event have much to tell us, nor do I think that anyone here has provided any evidence as to what those attitudes are. And I do think that concern for these wider issues of third-tier country attitudes to US policies is not a good one to encourage.

Posted by otto | April 8, 2007 12:58 PM

Wow, one of the Munich crowd invokes Iranian violations of the Geneva Convention with no sense of irony. I bet your fearless administration won't be making that point a lot in public. Or maybe they will because of course they combine stupidity and shamelessness into a particularly odious stew.

For God's sake, Germany was the largest nation in continental Europe in 1938, with the most advanced armaments industry in the world, a professional military second to none, a martial culture that had led to wars of aggression against France twice previsously in the prior sixty years, and the sense among many of its people that it had never truly been defeated on the battlefield. How is it analagous to Iran?

A knowledge of history is only worthwhile if you are able to deploy it in some rational fashion to present situations. Everything in the world isn't Munich in 1938.

Posted by Klein's tiny left nut | April 8, 2007 1:18 PM

Illegal combatants don't get Geneva protections. It's really as simple as that. If we were capturing uniformed combatants of an organized military, it would be different. However, we aren't - we are fighting irregular combatants who hide behind civilians - which is itself a violation of the conventions. Those conventions are reciprocal, not one way.

Posted by James Robertson | April 8, 2007 1:26 PM

James does a good job of being wrong on every point of fact. The Geneva conventions contain protections for every captive, with additional protections for captured soldiers, and allow for punishment of some kinds of war criminals only after hearings with specified characteristics. Furthermore, they are binding on each signatory individually - there is no "they're naughty so you can do what you want with them" provision at all.

Posted by Bruce Baugh | April 8, 2007 1:42 PM

They don't wear uniforms -- therefore we can torture them and detain them forever without due process. It's as simple as that. That's brilliant. You must have been a philosophy major.

It does not occur to you that we have lost all standing to admonish other countries about human rights because of this short sighted, piss your pants scared administration? And that the world is a poorer place for it.

Posted by Klein's tiny left nut | April 8, 2007 1:43 PM

Godwin's Law, first corollary: "As a discussion thread about American foreign policy continues, the probability that some idiot will compare a nation with a sixth-rate military to Germany in 1938 in order to argue for yet another disastrous military intervention approaches 1."

Posted by Scott Lemieux | April 8, 2007 2:03 PM

"Illegal combatants don't get Geneva protections. It's really as simple as that."

That statement is categorically incorrect -- and I would respectfully suggest that there is nothing "simple" about the subject matter.

The protections of the Third Geneva Convention (GCIII) are limited to POWs who satisfy the requirements set out in Article 4 of that Convention, i.e., lawful combattants. But the idea that prisoners who do not meet those requirements "don't get Geneva protections" has no basis in international law, period. While they are not entitled to the GCIII protections reserved for POWs, they are entitled to all other protections afforded by the Geneva Conventions.

The idea that states can do whatever they like to "unlawful combattants" in war zones is a notion (promoted by the Bush administration) that is at odds with the legal framework contemplated by the Geneva Conventions.

Posted by Eric | April 8, 2007 2:09 PM

Sorry, I missed Bruce Baugh's comment above before making the same point (far less concisely).

Posted by Eric | April 8, 2007 2:20 PM

Do you all realize what this means? The decision on whether or not the United States of America would go to war on a country which had not attacked us was left up to Tony Blair. The U.S. Congress was completely excluded from the decision. If Blair had said go, Bush would have bombed Iran.

Majorities of the American people and the Congress oppose military action in Iran. But the minority led by George Bush would have gotten their way on this vital matter. If the People's will is thwarted on a question like this, then the people do not control the most important decisions of their country.

Posted by The Fool | April 8, 2007 2:50 PM

Its not quite as bad as I thought, but it's still quite bad. Apparently we only offered to "aggressively patrol" or "buzz" the Revolutionary Guard positions, not bomb them, which is how I initially took it. Nevertheless, that would still be an aggressive use of military force that could easily trigger a backlash that spirals out of control. Ask yourself, how we would repond if the Iranians "buzzed" or "aggressively patrolled" the Pentagon?

Posted by The Fool | April 8, 2007 3:50 PM

It's not just a question of what the GC say about the treatment of unlawful combatants. There's also what the GC says about the treatment of non-combatants. There have been (and are) non-combatants in Guantanamo.

Posted by CharleyCarp | April 8, 2007 5:26 PM